Review of Nalo Hopkinson's "Midnight Robber"

So, here is another assignment that I've decided to post here. 

This was a really challenging assignment, because it is a book review--not an essay--which was really, really hard to keep on track.

I had to keep editing and deleting and going back to reread to be sure that I felt like I had the perfect amount of analysis to where it was not an essay, with the right amount of opinion to where it was a review, while trying to balance the taboo of too much summary!

It took me all weekend, but hopefully I was successful in my first attempt at a professional book review, and perhaps I'll try to gain more practice in doing so! 

I would love to someday be asked to write a review for a prominent blog or newspaper/magazine.

Hey, a girl can dream if she works hard for it, right?!

Happy reading!

The Language of Technology in Midnight Robber

“Oho. Like it starting, oui? Don’t be frightened, sweetness; is for the best. I go be with you the whole time. Trust me and let me distract you little bit with one anasi story: …” (Hopkinson 1) The novel immerses the reader from the first few lines, and envelops us into another world. It begins like a call for “story time” that I remember from my childhood, but the language is so strikingly different that it disoriented my expectations for this novel. Instead of a call for “story time” before bed, or to occupy time on a rainy day, this call for story time is steeped in mystery, and the thick accent of the narrative voice feels dark, melodic, and comforting—this may not be a happy story, it will likely be dark and scary and different, but I won’t be alone, because the storyteller narrator will be there with me, “Gather round, gather round, pickney! Come around, come around, pickney! Night come and work done; time for story now! ...Oonuh not too old for listen to story, you know! Yes, all of you, sit” (Hopkinson 78). The language of this call for story time is like an instantaneous transport into the world of Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, and sets the stage for a rhythmic tale of family, longing, and independence that are fought for through struggle and discordance. What is unique about the Creole accented narrator and the inferences to Caribbean folklore are its applications on the technology of the planet Toussaint and the larger world of the novel. By utilizing the language of Caribbean traditions, Hopkinson forces the reader to reevaluate the impact that language—specifically that from myth and folklore—of a culture has on its conceptualization, production, and naming of technology, while also making a commentary on preconceived notions of “civilized” and “primitive” cultures.

The familiarity of storytelling and short parables and being connected to others through technology is complicated by the Caribbean language and culture. Other critics have situated these notions of Antillean folklore storytelling and technological advancement in opposition to each other, rather than identifying the ways in which the two concepts are inherently connected. In an interview, Nalo Hopkinson defended this point on “how we think of technology,” stating that

“So many of our stories about technology and our paradigms for it refer to Greek and Roman myth and language: we name rocket ships “Apollo” and communication devices “telephone,” a human-machine interface a “cyborg.” It shapes not only the names for the technology we create, but the type of technology we create. I wondered what technologies a largely African diasporic culture might build, what stories its people might tell itself about technology” (“A Conversation”).  

This connection between the language of a culture and their technology forces the reader to reframe their expectations about binaries such as “primitive” and “advanced,” both in reality and within SF. Hopkinson pulls us into the question why a culture that is described as “primitive” cannot also be technologically advanced, and she answers with a society of pedicabs, cybernetic interfaces, traditional festivals, and personal AIs, and she bases this connection within language.

Junot Díaz is another author that plays with this twisting of language, storytelling, and cultural expectations by utilizing the Caribbean as a main setting, and employing Spanish and slang as a linguistic identifier of the unfamiliar (for English-speaking readers). As the narrator Yunior states in The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao on “being Antillean,” “…who more sci-fi than us?” (Díaz 21). In this novel, Díaz also employs short parables and side stories that act as a story-within-a-story framework similar to that seen in Midnight Robber, and by setting the novel in the Antilles, both authors play off of the concept of folklore and storytelling. The third world or the developing countries of the world are often a counterintuitive setting for an SF novel, and by connecting the traditional with the modern, both writers force the reader to rethink cultural and linguistic influences on technological advances and the combination of the primitive and the advanced. The term “sci-fi” has an implication of the future, and with that comes certain expectations of technology that Midnight Robber delivers, but in a way that has roots in the Caribbean culture, which includes most pronouncedly its folklore storytelling traditions. The language, accent, and slang of myth and the connectivity of “story time” is brilliantly applied to the technology of the novel. Instead, she continues on the track of creating a new and separate identity of sci-fi in the third world area of the Caribbean, relying on the language of that area instead of the Greek or Latin words typically found in many sci-fi novels that feature technology. Hopkinson draws upon the folklore of the Caribbean to name the eshu personal A.I.s and the Granny Nanny interface in a similar way to how Western culture has named spacecrafts “Apollo,” and planets “Mars” and “Venus.” This reframing of the connection between myths and folklore of culture with the language of technology generates a dialogue between what may be expected to connect or blend, and what may be expected to be divided.

Granny Nanny the interface that connects everything, Granny Nanny, is not quite the “Big Brother” figure from novels such as George Orwell’s 1984, but more like the family matriarch. She is what connects everything together—biology and technology, traditional history and the future, and individuals with each other. From the slang in the construction of her name, the reader can recognize Granny Nanny as an overbearing, protective, benevolent matriarch figure from Caribbean folklore. In an interview, Nalo Hopkinson gave the premise of the Granny Nanny figure, describing her as “…named after the revolutionary and magic worker who won independent rule in Jamaica for the Maroons who had run away from slavery,” revealing this figure as both an embodiment of Antillean history and an entity of technological advancement (“A Conversation”). Hopkinson goes even further into the theme of connectivity in language and traditional storytelling by giving the technology a language of its own, called “nannysong.” Nannysong is the language of the Granny Nanny interface—the language created to encompass the blend of tradition and technology. Spoken in tune, nannysong is often described as a “hum,” “chirp,” or “warble”; the language of technology (Hopkinson). These words can also be used to describe the ringing of a phone, an email alert notification, or even the now-ancient sound of dial-up internet humming so that we know it is connecting. The folkloric traditions of songs and oral storytelling combine in this formation of a language of technology and exhibits attributes of both the organic or biological and the mechanic or technological. The hum of a song and the hum of dial-up internet are singing the same song, nannysong, which is governed by the interface of Granny Nanny that analyzes and protects the individual users of the technology.

The way in which individuals of this world connect is through earbugs that are implanted into the ear at birth, making each citizen a being with both organic and technological parts. The mixture of organic life with technology brings an advancement at the level of the individual body, but Hopkinson doesn’t use the term “cyborg” to define them. She continues to extend the Caribbean language of the Caribbean culture to resist the Greek or Latin etymology, and instead of defining their status as cybernetic organisms, Hopkinson allows the reader to make the inference, and instead gives names like “earbug” that are acknowledged as a separate component of the human body—a bug that happens to be in the ear, rather than a replacement of body parts with machines. Granny Nanny is an interface that was literally injected into the planet Toussaint, making the entire planted a type of cyborg—but in a completely “revolutionary” way that seems closer to magic than technology. The personal AIs, the eshu, are referred to as such in the text, but with the lowercase “a.i.” instead of the capitalized “AI” which insinuates that the letters stand for the same words, but with different cultural roots. This is evident in the naming of the AI “eshu” rather than just acknowledging them as artificial intelligence technology and referring to them as programs or something similar, the name “eshu” is a reference to “the West African deity who can be in all places at once, who is the ghost in the machine” (“A Conversation”). Once again, the Caribbean roots are revealed through folklore and applied to the technology to reveal just how much language and culture shapes technology. The traditions and stories of the past are ever-present, and just as connected to the technologically advanced future world depicted in Midnight Robber.

Hopkinson uses the melodic rhythm of a Caribbean accent for the narrator to connect the reader to the novel, and all of its side-stories and parables within it. The use of the Creole accent is quite unique within the realm of science fiction (SF) and fantasy novels, wherein readers are typically greeted with the perspective of an English-speaking narrator from Western culture, with words that may have Latin or Greek roots that are familiar but just unfamiliar enough to be fantastic. On the occasion that English is not the only language present, other languages may be employed that were created for the sole reason of being utilized in a science fiction or fantasy novel, such as Elvish, that have no root or link to the world around us. Hopkinson’s linguistic choice for her narrator splices these expectations in such a way that it is both unexpected and yet familiar, and in this blurring, she creates the language of her own world within a world; as Díaz’s Yunior character says, “…who more sci-fi than us?” (Díaz 21). The Caribbean world itself is a world within a world, often forgotten in the divide between “East” and “West,” and by bringing the language of that margin, Hopkinson somehow manages to reveal something new in SF, and to acknowledge our own ethnocentricity and just how far that perspective reaches. This situation of what is typically seen as a developing or “third world” area as a technological hub of connectivity is quite interesting in the SF genre, because it exploits that notion of the familiar within the unfamiliar.

The connection between folkloric language and technology reveal the heavy influence of culture on how one develops, conceptualizes, and names technology. As I was reading, the language, accent, and word choices were something that hooked me from the opening lines and kept me fascinated by a new tone and rhythm of a narrative that I had never before experienced. But then, I had to reign myself back, and question why this tone was new to me, and why I would expect a specific linguistic narrative style, even in a genre such as SF in which anything can be possible. Hopkinson applies the language and culture of the worlds Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree not through a Westernized perspective, but through the lens of a Caribbean-centered perspective. By applying a different set of cultural traditions onto the concepts of technology, Hopkinson appears to be making a commentary on the ethnocentric assumptions of Western culture. When I opened the book, I was conditioned with words such as “cyborg,” “android,” and “Apollo” rather than words like “eshu,” “Douen,” or “doux-doux,” and the difference in language is based upon a difference in cultural history. In the representation of the technologically advanced world of Toussaint, the blending of folkloric traditional language and technology ultimately shatters preconceived notions of what a “civilized” or a “primitive” culture may look like. By uniting notions of the unexpected and the familiar, the fantastical and the real, the primitive and the civilized, Hopkinson successfully draws the reader into a commentary based out of one’s own ethnocentric perspective, all the while continuing with the narrative and the stories within stories, and the worlds within worlds. This draws the reader into the novel in such a way that it seeps into the depths of one’s mind, and lingers there even after the novel ends. Beginning with positioning the narrator as a protective companion to the tale, followed by cultural and technological repositioning, Midnight Robber draws to the surface a reflection of the reader’s own ethnocentric conceptions, and attempts to disrupt that rhythm of assumption. The theme of connectivity is saturated within the novel, and it gradually involves the reader as a component of the intertwined layers stories, events, and perspectives.

Works Cited

"A Conversation with Nalo Hopkinson." SF Site. N.p., 2000. Web. 31 May 2014.

Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007. Print.

Hopkinson, Nalo. Midnight Robber. New York: Warner, 2000. Print.